Camera obscura

The kitchen of a very, very familiar home in central rural India. Well, the old kitchen. There's a new kitchen the other side of the house now, and this is now a store room. I took this photo in the late eighties, I don't remember which year.

The sunlight streaming through small holes in the roof is illuminating the smoke from the cooking fires - not a lot of smoke at the moment, but still a little. Most of the smoke goes up and out between the tiles, but some stays in the room and keeps the mosquitoes and flies away - and over the years, gives people a variety of health problems itself, particularly eye troubles.

The holes in the roof also project images (camera obscura fashion) of the world outside onto the wall - just above centre you can see a lovely inverted view of distant trees, repeated through a different hole just to the left of the first image.

Other things you can see (download for the clearest view): on the right, an oil lantern; centre right, a couple of bags hanging on a wooden peg; centre left, a stack of aluminium cooking vessels cum water containers; on the shelf left of those, some bronze dishes (for serving meals on); below the cooking vessels, on the floor, a pretty painted tray. On the floor, a mat for sitting on, and just beyond it (near the tray) a battery radio casting a shadow in the light from the bright spot of sunlight on the wall above it.

And bottom left, just discernible in the gloom, a young lady looking round from doing some cooking at the floor-level cooking fire just out of shot - very like the facilities in [link] , but that's not the same house.